CSE 171: User Interface Design: Social and
Technical Issues9. Some Social and Ethical Issues

This chapter of the class notes discusses some social and ethical issues,
beginning with an overview the Actor-Network Theory approach to the sociology
of science and technology. There are also some notes on the Afterword of
Shneiderman's text.

9.1 Notes on Actor-Network Theory

Actor-network theory (abbreviated ANT), which was initiated by Bruno
Latour and Michel Callon in France, is an important recent approach to the
sociology of science and technology. The sociological angle is expressed by
one of Latour's favorite slogans, "follow the actors", which means
that the sociologist should not only look at what the actors do, but should
also be interested in what interests them, and (more doubtfully) even believe
what they believe. Actor-network theory focuses attention on the
socio-technical networks that engineers and scientists create to get
their projects done, emphasizing that no one acts alone (or if they do, then
no one notices, so it doesn't matter). In contrast to most other work in
sociology, actor-network theory does not distinguish (very much) between
"human" and "non-human" actors. In my opinion, this is more of a rhetorical,
or even dramatic, device than a theoretical axiom, but it certainly serves to
bring forward the important roles played by resources of all kinds, including
equipment, data, money, publicity, and power, and it is a useful
counterbalance to approaches that concentrate on just one of the two. The
neologism actant is sometimes used as a neutral way to refer to both
human and non-human actors, avoiding the strong human bias in the word
"actor."

Latour's view that people and machines should be treated as equal is
called the Principle of Symmetry, and it is sometimes applied in ways
that may be surprising. For example, he says we need to negotiate
with machines just as with people, we need to recruit them as
allies, to authorize and notify them, and to
mobilize and delegate them; he claims that this kind of
language should be taken literally not metaphorically. Of course,
this is opposite to what most philosophers (and ordinary people) think.
Perhaps these terms seem strange because they are so anthropomorphic
(i.e., human centered). Personally, I consider them mainly as suggestive
metaphors. What do you think?

Latour's book Aramis is the sad story of a project to build a highly
innovative public transport system in the suburbs of Paris; the story is sad
because the project fails, and the Aramis system is left without any friends.
In this book, Latour claims that only in successful projects can you figure
out what actually happened; this is perhaps a bit shocking. Does objectivity
really only exist for successful projects? This strange viewpoint comes from
his requirement that you (as the researcher) should take the viewpoint of the
actors, plus the observation that the actors will not agree among themselves
about what happened when the project failed, due to the dissolution of the
alliances recruited to create the project in the first place.

Another piece of Latour's unusual terminology is continous chains of
translation, which refers to the ever ongoing efforts to keep actors
involved with the project, by "translating" into their own languages and
values. This is part of his effort to overcome technological
determinism, which is the (false!) theory that technology is an
autonomous force that directly changes society. For example, the very
common phrase "social impact" embodies this false viewpoint. (To say that
technological determinism is false is not to deny that technology has social
effects - instead, it is to deny that one can ignore the social context of
technology.) Latour sometimes refers to (instances of) technological
determinism as "heroic narratives of technological innovation," since
particular examples (e.g., newspaper and magazine articles on the history of
technology) are often framed in such terms. In case you are doubtful that
technological determinism can be a problem, here are some examples.
Probably we've all heard the aphorism "If you build a better mousetrap, then
the world will beat a path to your door." A while ago in the local paper, I
saw the sentences "Cloning is inevitable once it is possible" and "Fusion
power just doesn't have the impetus to succeed." These articles were
written as if the projects involved had nothing to do with their context of
people and other things, but had a momentum of their own. Thus they were
highly misleading, by failing to address the real problems.

The word mediate is sometimes used for the role of intermediate
actants in these chains of translation; this terminology provides a nice way
to avoid the deterministic bias of the more usual ways of speaking of the role
of (for example) a machine, a paper record, or a technology, in some project
or part of a project.

In Aramis, Latour says (pp.99, 101):

The only way to increase a project's reality is to compromise, to
accept sociotechnological compromises.

The pertinent question is not whether it's a matter of technology or
society, but only what is the best sociotechnological compromise.

These quotations not only deny the separability of the social and the
technical (even munging them into a single word), but they also make the same
point as mentioned above, about the necessity for translations. Once all
these translations, or recuitments, succeed, the technology
"disappears", i.e., it becomes "transparent" and can be taken for granted.
But if the translations fail to "interest" the actors enough, then the actors
will go their own ways again, each with a different view of what the project
is (or was) about.

That's why ... it [i.e., the project] can never be fixed once and
for all, for it varies according to the state of the aliances. (p.106)

... each element ... can become either an autonomous element, or everything,
or nothing, either the component or the recognizable part of a whole. (p.107)

Note that this way of thinking has the effect of overcoming technological
determinism.

I would like to step outside this exposition of classical ANT for a moment
to emphasize a feature that is usually quickly passed over. Notice that
translation, mediation, or recruitment involves values in a crucial
way, since the point is to "interest" the actors by appeal to their own
values, using their own languages. This way of thinking about socio-technical
systems includes a clear understanding of the fact that many different value
systems and languages may be involved, and that communication is likely to be
happening in all of them. For non-human actants, these languages and values
may be technical, e.g., gears have some number of teeth per meter, and need
oil (note that politics is sometimes described using similar metaphors of
gears and oil!). My belief is that these values are the key to understanding
how any given system actually works.

An important methodological point is that, since values show up along the
links between actants, we can use this as a guide in seeking to understand a
socio-technical system: we should look for the values of actants by asking
what translations are being done to maintain each link in the network.

On page 108 of Aramis, Latour argues that the "division of labor"
into subprojects (and other aspects of projects) can only be made after a
project has succeeded (I called this the retrospective hypothesis in
Requirements Engineering as the
Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues). This may sound
like a radical view, but it is what you see in real projects, and quotes
from Latour's interviews with Aramis project participants, as well as my own
experience with other projects, back this up empirically. Pages 118 to 120
contrast VAL (a different French public transportation project that actually
succeeded) with Aramis, arguing that VAL can be described "heroically" only
because it succeeded. More significantly, Latour also argues that VAL
succeeded because it continued to compromise, whereas Aramis failed because
it did not continue to compromise.

The more a technological project progresses, the more the role of
technology decreases, in relative terms. (p.126)

To study Aramis after 1981, we have to add to the filaments of its network
a small number of people representing other interests and other goals: elected
officials, Budget Office authorities, economists, evaluators, ... (p.134)

A single context can bring about contrary effects. Hence the idiocy of the
notion of "preestablished context." The people are missing; the work of
contextualization is missing. The context is not the spirit of the times,
which would penetrate all things equally. (p.137)

In fact, the trajectory of a project depends not on the context but on the
people who do the work of contextualizing. (p.150)

In particular, Latour denies that sociology can ever attain a viewpoint that
is "objective," above and beyond the viewpoints of the participants, and he
even denies that there can be any "metalanguage" in which to express such a
viewpoint. This is a very different viewpoint from that of classical
sociology, but it is in full agreement with ethnomethodology.

Does there really exist a causal mechanism known only to the
sociologist that would give the history of a technological project the
necessity that seems so cruelly lacking? No, the actors offer each other a
version of their own necessities, and from this they deduce the strategies
they ascribe to each other. (p.163)

The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language
and their metalanguage. (p.167)

There are as many theories of action as there are actors. (p.167)

To the multiplicty of actors a new multiplicity is now added: that of the
efforts made to unify, to simplify, to make coherent the multiplicity of
viewpoints, goals, and desires, so as to impose a single theory of action.
(p.167-8)

To study technological projects you have to move from a classical sociology
- which has fixed frames of reference - to a relativistic sociology - which
has fluctuating referents. (p.169)

With a technological project, interpretations of the project cannot be
separated from the project itself, unless the project has become an object.
(p.172)

This is the only case where "classical" sociology might apply, and even then
only in a relative way.

By multiplying the valorimeters that allow them to measure the tests in store
and to prove certain states of power relations, the actors manage to achieve
some notion of what they want. By doing their own economics, their own
sociology, their own statistics, they do the observer's work ... They make
incommensurable frames of reference once again commensurable and translatable.
(p.181)

(The neologism "valorimeter" just refers to some way of measuring how well an
actor's requirements are being met; examples are passenger flow, cost,
publicity, etc.)

The interpretations offered by the relativist actors are performatives.
They prove themselves by transforming the world in conformity with their
perspective on the world. By stabilizing their interpretation, the actors end
up creating a world-for-others that strongly resembles an absolute world with
fixed reference points. (p.194)

(Performatives are speech acts that actually "perform" what they say,
i.e., they cause it to be the case; standard examples are christening and
marrying; this term comes from speech act theory.)
Latour claims that technologists, in doing their jobs, are actually doing
better sociology than classical sociologists.

It is interesting to contrast the view of ANT with the "dead mechanical
universe" of classical mechanics; the ANT universe is very much alive, full of
actors and their actions, full of all kinds of interactions, that are
constantly reconfiguring the network. Hence this is a very non-classical
point of view.

Actor-network theory can also be seen as a systematic way to bring out
the infrastructure that is usually left out of the "heroic" (or
"hagiographic") accounts of scientific and technological achievements, that
are unfortunately so common. Newton did not act alone in creating the
theory of gravitation: he needed observational data from the Astronomer
Royal, John Flamsteed, he needed publication support from the Royal Society
and its members (most especially Edmund Halley), he needed the geometry of
Euclid, the astronomy of Kepler, the mechanics of Galileo, the rooms, lab,
food, etc. at Trinity College, an assistant to work in the lab, the mystical
idea of action at a distance, and more, much more (see the book on Newton by
Michael White listed on the CSE 275
homepage). The same can be said of any scientific or technological
project: a network is needed to support it. Other famous examples of heroic
narratives in technology and science for which there exist good actor
network studies which take a non-heroic view emphasizing infrastructure
include Edison's invention of the electric light bulb and Pasteur's work on
bacteria (the latter by Bruno Latour).

For what it's worth, here is my own brief outline summary of some of the
main ideas of ANT:

There is an emphasis on networks and links, as opposed to
heroic individual "genuises".

The nodes in these networks, called actants, include not just
humans, but also non-humans, such as physical objects; they all do some kind
of work to maintain the integrity of the network.

Individual actants, and groups of actants, in general have different
value systems, so that translation among these systems is necessary
for a network to succeed; this work is done along the links in the network.
Socio-technical compromise is the work done to bring the various
technical and social nodes into alignment.

The structure of a project can only be seen clearly when these
translations (and hence the project) have been successful; hence the values,
and even the parts and structure, of a failed project are not in general well
defined.

The human actors in a project are in a sense sociologists, because they
must do acts of interpretation, which in effect are theories of the
project; this work should be taken very seriously by sociologists, who should
not assume that their own views are necessarily superior to those of the
actual participants.

It should not be thought that applying ANT consists of just drawing a
graph with some actants on nodes; the work that is done must be explored, and
the nature of the relations and values involved must be explored - often the
translations involved yield very interesting data; possibilities for
multiplicity and for dynamic adaptation should be explored; etc.

An important achievement of actor-network theory is that technological and
social determinism are impossible if you use its method and language
correctly. Of course, ANT has been much criticized, but (in my opinion) much
of the criticism has been from people who either didn't understand it, or who
rejected it for failure to conform with their own prefered paradigm. The
most valid criticisms should come from within this new paradigm. One
criticism of ANT from outside is that it dehumanizes humans by treating them
equally with non-humans; it is said that a brave new world is coming our way
that involves more and more interaction with machines, to the point of our
becoming cyborgs, but (they say) we should resist it rather than celebrate
it. Another criticism is that ANT fails to provide explanations for the
dynamic restructuring of networks. It is also said that ANT fails to take
account of the effects that technology can have on those who are not part of
the network that produces it, and that it therefore fails to support value
judgements on the desirability or undesirability of such effects. ANT is
also criticized for its disinclination (or inability) to make contributions
to debates about policy for technology and science. Some criticisms of ANT
from within can be found in Traduction/Trahison - Notes on ANT by
John Law, and in How things (actor-net)work: Classification, magic and
the ubiquity of standards by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, which
are discussed in Sections 7.2 and 7.3, respectively, of the CSE 275 class notes (these papers can
be fetched online via the readings page of CSE 275).

Another criticism, which seems mostly to come from curmudgeonly physical
scientists, and which in fact applies to most work in the sociology of
technology and science (abbreviated STS) is that it destroys the
credability of science, by leaving no place for the objective truth that
science (allegedly) uncovers. This is discussed in detail in Section 6.2 of the CSE 275 class notes, along with the fact that
by the nature of their work, sociologists of science should deliberately avoid
making commitments of this kind.

ANT is part of an area of STS that is often called constructivist,
because it focuses on how social systems get constructed by their
participants. The developers of ANT (Latour and Callon) have recently
declared that ANT is over, but of course it's too late now for them to stop
others from using, criticizing, and modifying their ideas.

A name for the general method of looking for what supports a technical or
scientific project, instead of telling a heroic tale, is called
infrastructural inversion (this term is due to Geoff Bowker). Its
converse, which is burying the infrastructure, I call infrastructural
submersion. The work of lab technicians, secretaries, nurses, janitors,
computer system administrators, etc. is very often subjected to
infrastructural submersion, with the effect of creating a very misleading
picture of the network involved; this is of course related to the heroic
narratives of classical sociology.

Leigh Star has defined boundary objects to be data objects or
collections that are used in more than one way by different social groups, and
that therefore provide an interface for those groups, translating across their
differences. One reason this idea is important is that it provides a model of
cooperation that does not require consensus. The notion of translation used
here comes from ANT. Boundary objects would seem to be especially relevant
for studying many social issues in computer science, and should have
interesting applications to many design problems.

9.2 So What?

It seems that one can see certain errors repeated again and again in
information technology businesses. One of these is making an overly ambitious
and overly precise business plan, and then trying to stick to it to the bitter
end. This is particularly common in startups, which by their nature are often
committed to going all out after an ambitious goal. But what we have learned
from actor network theory suggests that business plans should avoid being
overly committed and precise, and instead should include contingency planning:
they should sketch and cost out the scenarios that at that time seem the most
plausible, and explicitly budget for replanning at a certain point, where the
most plausible scenarios will again be sought. We all know that IPOs are a
gamble, and that this gamble usually fails; this empirical fact can be seen as
very strong support for the impossibility of making precise predictions about
interactions between society and technology.

Anyone who has worked in the computer industry, and especially in software
development, will have seen many instances of the phenomena described by actor
network theory, and will also have seen many instances of the kinds of myth
and foolishness that it is capable of exposing, including naive optimism,
hagiography, and technological determinism. In my opinion, a careful
contemplation of actor network theory, including a number of good case studies,
would be excellent preparation for high technology managers, and should be
required for all engineering students.

Returning to the focus of this class, actor network theory is an
excellent way to approach studying the ecological system of users and their
machines, as part of determining what kind of interface should be designed
and built for this system.

Much more information about the sociology of technology and science,
and especially information technology, can be found in the class notes and
readings for my course CSE 275.

9.3 Notes on the "Afterword" of Shneiderman

Shneiderman's text Designing the User Interface (4th edition with
CAterine Plaisant, Addison-Wesley 2005) has an "Afterword" entitled "Society
and Individual Impact of User Interfaces," which discusses a number of
significant social and ethical issues associated with user interface design.
Two major themes are (1) universal usablility, making computers more
available to disadvantaged users (such as blind users, people living in
poverty, elderly users), and (2) arguing against "animism" which is trying to
design machines to be like humans. The latter is really a,n extension of the
"agent squabble" that we discussed earlier.

It is very unusual to find something like this in a computer science
textbook. Can you imagine it in a book on operating systems, or compilers?
Most of this section is interesting, and some of it is inspiring. However, I
would like to add two caveats. Shneiderman does not sufficiently recognize
the ways in which social and technical issues are intertwined, as immediately
suggested by the word "impact" in the title of this section. This is a
common error, that can be corrected by the material on actor-network theory
earlier in this section of the class notes.

As far as hopes and visions go, why not hope for world peace, universal
human rights, adequate food, shelter and clothing for all on the planet, for
happiness and a balanced state of mind for all? Of course, such hopes serve
to emphasize the fact that these are primarily social issues, in which user
interface design in the narrow sense can have little impact. But if we take
user interface design in the broader sense suggested by semiotics, in which
almost anything can be seen as an interface, this objection disappears,
although we may be left feeling daunted by the magnitude of the tasks that
are implied, both theoretical (how can we develop semiotics further in ways
that will make it more useful for such goals?) and practical (how can we make
some real progress towards such goals?). At present we can only make some
small steps in these directions, but I agree with Shneiderman that we should
keep in mind large scale goals and visions as we stumble forward. One thing
we can do is try to help local civic organizations with web design through
class projects; this benefits education as well as the organizations and the
users that they serve.

Certainly user interface designers can expect to come face to face with
many important moral issues in their work; indeed, I would go so far as to
claim that designing "good" interfaces is already a moral issue. One need
only think of UID for medical systems, nuclear reactors, and defense systems
to see that there are important applications with significant moral
dimensions. But even more prosaic applications raise similar issues; e.g.,
consider the design of web search engines. A semiotic study of some ethical
aspects of search engines can be found in The Ethics of Databases, and
the course CSE 175: Social and Ethical
Aspects of Information Technology, goes into ethical aspects of
information technology in some detail.